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qorchin-ongods

Source: TW

A bucket with the images of the ongod-s of the shamans of the Qorchin tribe of Mongols. They are the descendants of Chingiz Khan’s brother Qasar & his followers. At the time of the rise of the Tungusic lord Nurhachi who founded the Manchu empire, they broke away from their cousins to join the resurgent Tungus & were major factor in their dominance & power down to the battles with the Europeans in China – the last blaze of Mongol prowess.

Their shamans curiously claim descent from Kököchü the shaman of the Khan who caused a major fight between him & Qasar. The Khan’s wife later warned him of the rifts Kököchü was causing & he was eliminated by the 3 wrestlers when the shaman’s brothers tried to fall on the Khan himself.

The ongod-s, like those shown above, are the deities & ghosts that possess the shamans. They worship a subset of them in the form of those idols & invoke them when they seek a possession. The Chingizids records say the ongod-s were originally made with felt but at some point they seem to have shifted to bronze.

There is a curious tale regarding how the Qasarid shamans captured ghost ongod-s. It is a tale which a parallel to that of lalitAditya’s campaign in the rAjataraMgiNi but here the central figure is the Tang emperor Taizong. It says that Taizong’s general Wu with an army of 10000 was crossing a sandy stretch to attack the Khitans but fell into a trap there & died. Their posthumous “spirits” became various types of ghosts depending on the position they adopted while falling to their deaths. When Qasar acquired these lands as his ulus, his shamans are said to have mastered these ghosts & they continue to be used.

This tale relating to the remote Tang age was probably transmitted by the Khitan to their successors. However, there is no evidence that such an army of a general Wu died on the Khitan campaign. Instead the old book of Tang says that Taizong met the Khaghan of Khitans enroute to Korea & formed an alliance with them in this region to destroy the Goguryeo Koreans. This could instead be a telescoped memory of the subsequent period when the Tang-Khitan alliance broke down and the latter had massacred a chIna force.